2. What can you learn about women from these data?
Gender plays an important role in what you can learn because all of these data, with a few exceptions, are reported both for men and for women. Women are especially invisible in this period of time. Women left far less information about their lives behind. Women in the Hapsburg Monarchy could not vote.
Its possible to reconstruct the employment picture of women at a district-by-district level, instead of the whole province of BohemiaI can look down into individual districts like the city of Prague or a rural district like Semil.
In 1910, the adult population of Prague, this means those over the age of 18, was 223,737 of which 118,524 were female. So women constituted 53% of the population of Prague. Of those 118,524 women, 22,045 of them were listed by the authorities as engaged in self-employed pursuits. This could be anything from owning their own shop to being a professional. There were, in fact, women lawyers in the Austrian monarchy by 1910. Not very many, but there were a couple. It could mean that they were street vendors. It could mean many different things. It could mean also that they were engaged in agriculture.
If we look at industrial workers, 24% of the industrial workers in Prague were female, which is actually a very high percentage at this time. Those engaged in household work, meaning cleaning, nannying, cooking, that sort of thing, 99% of them were female. Not very many men engaged in household work. Of those who were unemployed, meaning that they had no profession to answer on the form, 71% of them were female.